Assessment Truths that We Hold as Self-Evident and Their Implications

Content Provider	Semantic Scholar
Author	Case, Susan M.
Copyright Year	1997
Abstract	This paper discusses six truths related to assessment, highlighting at first the fact that there seem to be few real truths in assessment; most “truths” are at best half-truths (Truth #1). Nevertheless, it is important to read the literature (Truth #2), because strong relationships between today's 'new' assessment methods and the methods of our predecessors make it important to note lessons of the past. The method used for assessment provides no guarantee of what is measured, nor how well it is measured (Truth #3). Therefore, it makes no sense to hawk one method over another as if the method alone provides a guarantee of anything. One reason that the quality of assessment is important is that evaluation drives student learning (Truth #4). Teachers should use the power of assessment to drive student learning in the direction they want it to go. The truth (#5) that it takes many cases/items/raters to generate a reproducible score has stimulated an ongoing debate between educators and measurement experts: this truth is of relatively little importance to educators who might not want to extrapolate beyond the particular performance that is observed, but of paramount importance to measurement experts who want to generalize across tasks, across patients, and across raters. In order to view a score as a measure of general clinical competence, you need to sample from the larger domain to which you want to extrapolate. The final truth (#6) is that no single method can assess competence fully. Each method has something unique to offer; it is ridiculous to become such a zealot of one method that all other forms of assessment are avoided.
Starting Page	2
Ending Page	6
Page Count	5
File Format	PDF HTM / HTML
DOI	10.1007/978-94-011-4886-3_1
Alternate Webpage(s)	https://page-one.springer.com/pdf/preview/10.1007/978-94-011-4886-3_1
Alternate Webpage(s)	https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-4886-3_1
Language	English
Access Restriction	Open
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article